To say that Sony's mobile brand is one dogged by turbulence is a bit of an understatement: The Xperia division recorded a loss of $544 million for the 2015 financial year. That's partly thanks to tribulations brought on by its parent company's continued restructuring — it cut 1,000 jobs in Europe and China early last year.
But also to blame are an inexplicable series of management missteps: the Xperia Z3+, one of the first smartphones to sport Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 chipset, was initially plagued by reports of overheating, and when Sony's latest handset, the Z5, became available in North America an off-contract capacity, it bizarrely shipped without a fingerprint sensor.
Sony's desperate for a hit, needless to say. And if the rumors are true, it is going the scorched earth route to get one: Cryptic images show a previously unrevealed Sony handset that's a radical departure from the company's established design language.
Rumored specs
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A profiteering user of Njuškalo, Croatia's dominant classified ads website, has listed a unit of the unreleased smartphone for sale. The seller describes it as " a new model of Xperia X Performance," and provided a few specifications.
According to the listing, the phone features a 5.1-inch display, 23MP rear-facing camera and 12MP front-facing camera, 3GB of RAM, and "non-slippery" metal housing. A USB Type-C port appears to be on tap — a first for Sony — and so too does a 3.5mm headphone jack. Everything else is a big unknown.
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Everything else remains a big unknown.
Design 
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The photographed handset, which GSM Arena reports might be the "F8331," features geometry that stands in angular contrast to this year's Xperia X. The aesthetic might almost be described as brutalist: the phone's top and bottom edges terminate harshly at the edges, and there's no sign of the rounded, sloping corners of the type on the Xperia X. Rather, the prototype's longer edges taper at its front and rear, evoking Nokia's Lumia series of Windows Phones. It's not entirely seamless — the phone's rear cover sports a discolored tab near its bottom, presumably to accommodate antennas, and a camera and flash dominate the top-left side. But it's not all bad: the image's source claims the screen is larger than that on the Xperia X.
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MoreRelated: Sony Xperia X review
It may not be long before Sony blows the lid on its skunkworks phone, though — it's scheduled to make an appearance at September's IFA conference in Berlin. Realistically speaking, there's no guarantee the leaked handset will ever see the light of day. And even if it did, it might be bound for destinations overseas: according to leaked documents obtained by Xperia Blog in July, Sony plans to "defocus" its mobile business in the United States, India, China, and Brazil in the coming months in favor of alternative East Asian, European, and Middle Eastern countries.
Updated on 07-25-2016 by Kyle Wiggers: Added specs from an alleged classified ad.
Article originally published on 07-25-2016.
Source: Mysterious, Lumia-like smartphone could be Sony's next Xperia
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